Groupsrv.com is closed!

After nearly 11 years, I’ve finally decided to pull the plug on Usenet archive: Groupsrv.com.

During the best times (6+ years ago), Groupsrv.com had over 1 million monthly visitors and very active discussion forum. At one point it was even in the top 10k of most visited websites in the world. But those times are long gone.Overall usage of Usenet among internet users has been slowly declining ever since and number of visitors to Groupsrv.com could no longer sustain the expense of storing hundreds of gigabytes of compressed Usenet archives. I’ve realized, it was time for me to move on and take the site down.

Little background. For those of you who didn’t know… Usenet was developed in 1979 and fully established in 1980. It allowed its users to read and post messages (articles – posts) in various categories, known as newsgroups. Unfortunately, Usenet never grew up to be a full fledged discussion system and for many years it remained as a superficial hybrid between email and a discussion board. I’ve created Groupsrv.com to help bridge that gap. Domain allowed its visitors to read and post articles to Usenet by using only a browser, skipping complicated newsgroup email configuration and use of an email client altogether.